My favorite Klein story--we live @80 miles from his area.
About 12 years ago, a work associate of my wife's who heard that we had just
put a Rossin together for her mentioned "Hey, Gary Klein rides one of those.
We have relatives near him, I've seen him riding it on the road." So there
you have, the aluminum bike man as a closet Italian steel rider.
David FEldman
Vancouver, WA
> while on the subject of gary klein, you all may get a kick out of
this.
> i was in the engineering department machine shop one day up at my alma
mater
> (dartmouth college) when the shop staff guy and i started chatting. he
> asked what i was doing, and i said "oh, building some tools for bike frame
> building" he told me he used to work at the engineering machine shop at
> MIT. i said "oh, that's where gary klein learned the trade" and he said
> "yeah that punk kid stole a bunch of tools from us when he graduated!"
> interesting. we continued chatting and it came out in conversation that
the
> shop staff guy had a low opinion of mr. klein (as a person, all
engineering
> skills aside),
>
> chris root
> bloomfield, ct
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Message: 8
> From: GPVB1@cs.com
> Date: Sun, 29 Dec 2002 19:23:45 EST
> Subject: Re: Gary Klein, was Re: [CR]CR Villains
> To: classicrendezvous@bikelist.org
>
> Gotta go with Jerry on this one. No one said he "invented" them, but
Gary
> Klein was *the* one who, after the MIT framebuilding class, went on to
> market
> a real product, and the rest is history, as they say.
>
> A friend of mine is a Mechanical Engineering Professor here at the
> University
> of Michigan, and when I first met him, I saw a bare, homemade-looking
> aluminum road frameset hanging in his basement. I asked what it was, and
he
>
> replied that he had made that as a student at MIT. I asked if Gary was in
> the
> class; he replied "yup." Cool!!
>
> The Engineer that sent a resume and a design proposal to Cannondale
> alledgedly sent the same information to about two hundred various
> bike-related companies, and the only one to respond was C'dale.... Smart
> move
> on their part, I'd say!
>
> As for 1970s boron-reinforced Klein Team Supers being "marginally on
topic"
> I
> would defer to Dale on that one, but I'd be surprised if he agreed with
> that
> statement....
>
> Cheers,
>
> Greg "that's the only TIG'ed aluminum frame I'd ever be interested in
BTW"
> Parker
> A2 MI USA